


A Killing Frost

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: Cirque de Triomphe [43]
Category: Batman (Comics), DCU
Genre: (Freeze does not win it), Cryogenics, Earth-3, For Science!, Gen, Hypothermia, Ice Powers, Male-Female Friendship, POV Female Character, Superpower Lottery, Team Up, that one lab accident
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-14
Updated: 2015-08-14
Packaged: 2018-04-14 11:33:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4563018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That <em>stupid</em> cryochamber, she thought bitterly, as she dragged his dead weight over her shoulders and began the long trek uphill. Oh, she understood that sometimes people would do anything rather than let go of someone they loved, but did he have to keep trying to improve it? The Missus was good and frozen already, wasn't she? And if he had to tinker with it, why'd he have to drag Crystal and her extensive experience with supercoolants in?</p><p><em>You were all for it,</em> her better nature reminded her acidly. <em>Lower the power requirements for Nora's Cooler? Save money? Do awesome science? Where's the downside?</em></p><p>The downside was slumped across her back, with a rapidly dwindling core temperature that Crystal's own body kept trying to cannibalize even as it fell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Killing Frost

**Author's Note:**

> And another tally for 'character combo AO3 has never heard of.' 
> 
> ^^ Killer Frost's cold powers actually _do_ work by sucking the heat out of things. Because she was originally a Firestorm villain, and he has the best physics of all superheroes ever. Fullstop. Yes, even though he is two people and his head is on fire.

As Crystal pounded down the hill, dragging every iota of heat she could find out of the frostbitten air while she could, she heard her own voice echoing loudly in memory.

" _Come on, no," she'd groaned, when Heat Sink and Deep Freeze had slammed into combat alongside the Gotham Circus a few months ago and, fighting back to back with Harlequin, she'd gotten yet another round of teasing about her imaginary love life. "I do not think of Victor like that. Just because you're_ madly _in love you have to go projecting it on everyone else?"_

" _Hee, I'm sorry, it's just…you're partners…."_

" _If you can tell me you pull the same thing on Mothman and Firefly I'll give you a pass. No? Come on, Harlequin! Where's your pride as a woman?"_

_The tiny zanni kicked a goon in the sternum and thrust her chin out. "Right where it belongs! My sense of romance is a bit old-fashioned, that's all."_

" _Pfft. I'm glad you're happy with your lunatic and all, but girl, I do not need a man to be happy. And even if I did, Victor is too old for me, not my type, and as married as you are."_

_She hit the pavement as the rattle of automatic fire burst into the air, and Harlequin went flat beside her, sheltering behind what had been a decorative raised stone flower bed. The clown gave Crystal a sidelong look from her crouch. "I thought he was a widower…?"_

" _Technically, no. He's…don't tell him I told you this, but someone should know. He's got Nora in cryo. Keeps trying to teach himself more and more advanced autoimmune medicine, like he'll be able to discover a cure to Eckles-Leifson's Disease all by himself and unfreeze her and live happily ever after." Crystal squinted over the wall in a break in the gunfire, spotted the man reloading his machine gun, and sniped him with one well-placed ice dagger. "It would be creepy if he wasn't such a dork," she shrugged, leaping upright as the bad guys who'd hung back while covering fire had been going on surged forward. None of them had the wherewithal to seize the downed man's weapon. Thank science for stupid bad guys. "He's a good man, and he watches my back, but we're not like that. So can you just…"_

" _I'll stop," Harlequin had promised, going into a hyperaccelerated spin on Crystal's patch of ice to sweep out the feet of a whole line of goons, but Crystal could tell from the smile in her voice that she didn't buy it._

It was _true,_ though, she thought furiously, as she stumbled to a stop at the edge of the frozen river and stomped down on her power with all her might, refusing to swallow an iota of the tiny amount of heat that existed in this air, and dropped to one knee. They weren't like that. Victor was as sexy as a very bald log.

But she hadn't realized until now just how important he _was_ to her. They were partners. She _trusted_ him. That meant a lot. Three years working together… "Come on, Vic," she whispered, reaching out with hands that _would not_ freeze what they touched if her will meant anything at all, and dragging his limp limbs free of the ice. He'd stripped off his shirt before passing out; she didn't even know if that was the hypothermia symptom or a clumsy attempt at emergency decontamination. "You're going to make it. Breathe."

That _stupid_ cryochamber, she thought bitterly, as she dragged his dead weight over her shoulders and began the long trek uphill again toward somewhere she could start hypothermia treatment. Stupid, stupid freezerchest. Oh, she understood that sometimes people would do anything rather than let go of someone they loved, but did he have to keep trying to improve it? The Missus was good and frozen already, wasn't she? And if he had to tinker with it, why'd he have to drag Crystal and her extensive experience with supercoolants in?

 _You were all for it,_ her better nature reminded her acidly. _Lower the power requirements for Nora's Cooler? Save money? Do awesome science? Where's the downside?_

The downside was slumped across her back, with a rapidly dwindling core temperature that Crystal's own body kept trying to cannibalize even as it fell. _God_ , why couldn't she transfer heat energy to anyone besides herself? Why did she have to get such a hungry, selfish power?

"Why'd you have to break a coolant line, you big idiot?" she muttered. Her foot slipped on a patch of ice, sweet irony, and she almost dropped her partner and went tumbling down the hill again, probably to break at least one of their crowns, or break through the river crust and drown. She hit her knees instead, held onto Victor, lurched onto her feet again.

Thirty more yards, she told herself. Thirty more yards and we're back in the lab. The part that _isn't_ full of sublimated experimental substances. "And if you had to have a stupid lab accident," she grated, wedging her right foot into a dent in the dirty snow and heaving the both of them another six inches higher, "what possessed you to go tearing out into the night and fall down a hill before you passed out? This is why I hate you, you know that? You get carried away! No matter what's going on, you always…"

Her heart jolted. _Just_ as she'd gotten high enough to see over the ridge, barely a minute from the goal…she felt her partner's body heat give out. There was _nothing there._ His stiff, heavy weight had not changed a straw, but to her sense of warmth he might as well have been just another piece of the frozen night. A slab of ice or stone. "No," she breathed.

" _No!"_ she shouted, and with everything she had charged the rest of the way up the hill, slammed her way inside the kind warmth of their lab, dropped Victor onto his own discarded coat, lying on the floor from earlier this evening when he'd been too much of a slob to hang it up before getting to work, for long enough to latch the door and get a blanket over the stainless-steel counter, and then heaved him up onto it with strength she hadn't known she had.

Her tears jingled against the edge of the counter, peeling off her cheeks as solid crystals when the skin under them stretched with her grimace of effort. "Don't you dare," she ground out, as she swung the heat lamps into place above the work surface, trying to get his blood warmed again. She groped for a lab knife, then made herself calm down enough to slice off his stiff-frozen slacks and snowman boxers without drawing blood. "Don't you _dare_ die, Vic. Don't you dare." The good thing about her power, she thought as she shook up a handful of chemical heat packs (designed to be tucked inside gloves and boots), was that it meant that in winter they kept around a _hell_ of a lot of sources of artificial heat.

She laid a paper towel over Victor's chest and slapped the little pouches across it, letting them do their exothermic thing while she got a blanket over him. "You aren't dying," she told him. He'd been tens of degrees below the temperatures that usually caused organ failure even before he went ambient-cold. Didn't matter. "We are going to figure out what the hell was in that line, and fix it. And Luthorcorp has a team working on Eckles-Leifson's right now, you think I'm going to wake Nora up to get cured just to tell her you got yourself killed trying to save her? I don't even know the woman!"

The fierce little furnace in the basement was cranked up to full blast, and the temperature in the lab was steadily climbing toward eighty. Crystal rounded on the inert form of her friend, shook a finger. She knew she couldn't rush this; warm a hypothermia patient too fast and they went into shock. Which could be just as fatal.

"No, you are surviving this," she ordered. "And getting better. And we are going to do more science and eat stupid kettle corn and next summer we are going to the board walk again and getting those awful ice-cream bars, and we won't have to costume up and avert a boatjacking this time, and…and…" She rubbed at her eyes with the back of one hand; her tears had rimed so heavily on her eyelashes it was obscuring her vision. "You've gotta introduce me to Nora someday," she said hopelessly. "You promised."

The whole room was warming up, and he was still a blank spot in her heat-sense. Cold, cold, icy cold.

No amount of talking was going to change that. He'd been dead before she even started treatment. She'd failed him. Maybe there'd been no saving him, maybe that coolant _she'd helped him develop_ had sealed his fate, even before he'd ever burst out into the dark like the idiot he was. Maybe she'd never had a chance. Crystal's fists shook. And then she moved forward, stiff, her own breathing jerky in her ears. She didn't have the right equipment to treat severe hypothermia—there were heated oxygen masks and warm-fluid IVs and things, she'd read a _lot_ about hypothermia treatment trying to combat her own nightmares of freezing everyone around her to death—and that was her own stupid short-sightedness, but maybe CPR would get his heart going, and then if she called an ambulance they could still…

She jumped. He still had a pulse.

Had a pulse in his throat, in his _wrist,_ when she checked. He was breathing, in tiny puffs, and his breath was cold.

That wasn't possible.

It wasn't possible, but _she_ was alive, and endothermic as anything. When she wanted to be.

Experimental coolant. Different from the ultra coldbox she'd been trapped in, but—could the same thing happen twice?

The quest for absolute zero.

It had had at _least_ one completely bizarre casualty already. (One Crystal Frost, PhD.) No matter how low the odds were, the fact that it had happened at all more or less determined that the chances of repetition were non-zero.

It didn't matter how unlikely it was. Her partner was _alive._

Crystal got his body temperature up to a chilly 25°C with continual heat infusion, and then faced a new crisis: where her body would have swallowed down the heat until she got enough strength back to stop pulling so much ambient energy, and effectively increased in temperature, Victor was warming only slightly slower than the average frozen corpse. (And it should have been faster, if anything; none of his body fluids had frozen solid. She needed to take a blood sample; was he _replicating_ the supercoolant biologically? She wasn't a biologist, dammit!)

More importantly, he was starting to show all the signs of heat stroke, apart from the thing where he was still _below possible temperatures for survival_.

Everything she knew said to keep warming him up. There were other reasons his blood pressure could be falling and his heart fluttering, and his breath coming shorter and shorter, for him to have started and then dramatically stopped sweating. He'd just been covered in substances never tested on living things before being frozen. It could be it was only the extreme cold that had slowed down the poisoning until now. She should call the hospital _now._

Except he was alive, he'd had a normal heartbeat at 3°C and something clearly abnormal was happening, but if she called an ambulance procedure would _demand,_ absolutely and at the risk of the firing of every EMT, nurse, and doctor involved, that they try to get him up to normal human temperature, because that was what you did when you had a hypothermic patient. They probably wouldn't listen to her, not when she had no hard data and wasn't a doctor herself. If hyperthermia went unchecked, it caused organ failure far more irreparably than an equivalent dose of cold. So letting them determine by trial and error what she'd come to suspect was taking too much of a risk with Vic's life.

Not that this wasn't.

Facing the possible consequences head-on, Crystal _ripped_ the heat from the air around Victor. From the blankets covering him, and all the trusty little chem-packs and hot water bottles underneath. She pulled until the temperature hovered around the freezing point of water, and then kept it there, drinking in any warmth that tried to invade the bubble of air around the table. She could have taken more—there was _plenty_ of heat left in matter at 273 Kelvin—but she wouldn't. Just to be safe. It was only ten below outside; if Vic hadn't been covered in supercoolants he wouldn't have had time to become _seriously_ hypothermic before she rescued him, shirt or no shirt.

His body dumped heat into the air and the now-chilly hot water bottles and the steel countertop like water through a sluice gate, and as his core temperature dropped past ten, his breathing eased toward something still shallow, but no longer ragged. She hauled out a blood pressure cuff and, assuming her memory of normal biostats was both correct and still applicable, that was improving, too. Crystal moved away, carefully keeping the temperature around his worktop steady, to turn the furnace down and check the seal around the door to the testing lab. The vents had kicked in, and were shunting the fumes into storage tanks. Crystal was just weighing how long she could afford to wait before leaving Victor alone to go make sure Nora wasn't thawing, when his breath changed.

For the first time since the coolant line had broken, Victor Frieze drew a deep breath. Crystal fairly flew back across the lab, and got there in time to see his eyes flick open.

They'd been brown, before. Now they were pale, pale blue. She swallowed.

Victor's brow furrowed, with those lines the fretful idiot had already given himself by the time he hit thirty. "Crystal…?" he croaked at her.

Relief hit her like a train she hadn't even known she was waiting for. He was still there. Still Vic.

"You're going to be okay," she told him.

His eyes widened a little, and he tried to sit up. "Is Nora—the lab accident—"

Crystal pushed him back before he could collapse. "Relax. The cooler is still solid, and the whole lab is still sub-zero. I'll go out and tinker with the thing in a bit, you just lie back and pull yourself together. You thirsty?"

"Uh…I am, actually." He shifted a little, frowning at the spent heat-packs sliding off his torso and the flat rubber bottles of water with ice rattling inside propped against his sides and legs. "What…" He peered under the blankets, and didn't quite blush. "Wait. Did you…?"

Crystal snorted as she dug out some bottled water and cracked it open for him. "You got covered in experimental chemicals, moron. If you're into dying to preserve your modesty, by all means…"

Mortification was chased by annoyance and then chagrin. "Sorry." Victor fidgeted; Crystal decided right then to deny him clothes for a while in hopes it would keep him still. "Thank you."

"I'm not sure how much help I was," Crystal admitted. She'd almost killed him; he'd probably have been better off recovering on the frozen river, without the extra stress she'd put on his system trying to warm him up.

Vic didn't argue; he'd already lost interest in his near-death experience. "You can see to Nora now," he said, as he accepted the new water and Crystal sat him up enough to drink it without it going up his nose. "I'm fine."

She didn't argue for long. She turned the heat off and cracked the outside door—Vic was smart; if she put this off a little longer he'd work out he was some kind of meta now and she wouldn't have to tell him—and slid into a hazmat suit to go confront Nora's Goddamn Cooler.

Really, she reflected, she had nothing against Nora Frieze. She _did_ have something against the sight of a woman, dead for all practical purposes, frozen in a box, because that should have been her. That _had_ been her; she remembered dying, she'd just lived through it.

And now she'd watched her best friend die because of her work, even if he'd woken up again, too. If thermodynamics weren't so endlessly fascinating, maybe she'd have given up on science by now. But her powers opened avenues of study no one else could pursue, and vigilantism was nothing to build a life around, so here she was. Drinking in the cold.

There would be time later to worry about side effects and dangers of Vic's condition, about whether he'd blame her once he had a chance to get his bearings, and whether it would be necessary to seek a research grant to Antarctica or something. For now...

She stepped into the lab, into the cold, to do what she could. As ever.

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted Crystal's hero name to be Frostbearer because then it would be A) kind of pretty and B) a geeky pun, but my beta said no, no, and also no. So she's Heat Sink. Which is much less pretty and slightly less geeky, but at least fun to say.
> 
> Just as well; secret identities are hard enough without both of you putting your actual names in your code names, good grief, Victor. (I totally hear Sora's voice in my head every time I type 'Deep Freeze,' though.)


End file.
